Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence

Integrating evidence from psychology, criminology, sociology, history, anthropology, and other disciplines to provide insight into the roots of cruelty and violence, Baumeister finds vivid examples, both historical and modern.

How do “ordinary” people find themselves beating their wives? Murdering rival gang members? Torturing political prisoners? Betraying their colleagues to the secret police? Why do cycles of revenge so often escalate? With an examination of our culture’s myths about evil, the book progresses through the “whys” of evil toward a discussion of a paradox in human psychology – our tendency toward guilt, a natural mechanism that suppresses evil, and our inclination toward ambivalence, a feeling that enables evil to flourish.